Museum building and art collecting in the nineteenth century United States started as a man’s affair. Women might spread their home-based authority through associations into morality-based reforms of schools, prisons and even the highly political realm of abolition, but the heavy cultural lifting of art collecting had to be left ...
(Show more)Museum building and art collecting in the nineteenth century United States started as a man’s affair. Women might spread their home-based authority through associations into morality-based reforms of schools, prisons and even the highly political realm of abolition, but the heavy cultural lifting of art collecting had to be left to their husbands with the big check books. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, when those collections found their way into museums, they had often been under the care of widows for several decades. Sarah Harrison, 1817-1906, outlived her husband the collector engineer Joseph Harrison, by 32 years. So it was she who maintained, expanded and then disposed of the family art collection that included some of America’s best known paintings. Anna Wilstach, 1822-1892, outlived her husband William P. Wilstach, the harness and leather magnate and collector, by 22 years. It was her will that left significant capital as well as paintings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art changing it from a teaching and technological institution into the collecting museum it is today. Louisine Havermeyer, 1855-1929, Mrs. Henry O. Havermeyer, outlived her collector husband by 22 years as well. Her bequests of great masters and impressionist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art rank in importance with the gifts of J. P. Morgan, Robert Lehman and just a few others. This paper attempts to measure this feminizing of American cultural institutions at the very period that they were dropping their early educational vocation to become the cultural powerhouses we know. The Women’s Pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago offers an important window on this women’s work. The pavilion was decorated with works from these women’s collections and organized by another collecting woman, Bertha Palmer, who survived her husband, Potter Palmer, by 16 years. Both Bertha Palmer and Louisine Havemeyer were advised on their purchases by Mary Cassatt who along with Mary MacMonnies, painted large murals for the exposition. Far from being a feminist outpost in American culture, it is the contention of this paper that the Women’s Pavilion was the model for women’s use of culture and became a model for American museums of the first importance.
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